Literacy and Social Studies

 

Social Studies Improves Reading Comprehension

I've been reading about how kids learn to read and it's fascinating! It turns out reading requires two things: 

1. Understanding how letters come together to form words (phonics)
2. Understanding how words come together to create meaning (comprehension).

Traditional literacy instruction is great for #1, but it turns out that social studies is better for #2. It's true! A longitudinal study of K-5 students found that "Social studies is the only subject with a clear, positive, and statistically significant effect on reading improvement."

I was curious why that might be, so I started reading articles by literacy experts and educational psychologists. It turns out that comprehension requires that you know words (vocabulary) and that you have enough background knowledge in a subject to fill in the blanks that every piece of writing leaves. 

There is lots of data that background knowledge (including domain-specific vocabulary) is essential for comprehension. For example, a couple of elegantly designed studies demonstrated that poorer readers who know more about baseball do better at comprehending a reading passage about baseball than students with higher reading scores.

There's probably no subject that can do more for students' general background knowledge (and for the development of vocabulary) than social studies. I suspect that's why spending more time on studying social studies improved reading scores.

Embedding Literacy Strategies into Social Studies Improves Literacy Even More

There's something even better than simply adding more time for social studies (which is tremendously short-changed in elementary school). That's embedding literacy activities/strategies into your social studies instruction. That's what we did with the Montana: A History of Our Home, so if you are teaching Montana history in grades 4-6, you are in luck! The work is done for you. If you teach other topics, there are some simple strategies you can use. I'll feature one below and others in future posts.

Write Your Way In and Write Your Way Out  

Salish Kootenai College education professor Tammy Elser introduced me to this simple but powerful technique, and we use it over and over in our lesson plans.

When you are about to study a new topic:

• Ask students to take out a pencil and their writing journals, or a sheet of paper, and date it.  
• Tell students: You will be thinking hard and writing for the next five minutes. I will run a timer and you will keep writing the whole time, not lifting your pencils until the timer stops. If you get stuck, just write “I’m thinking, I’m thinking” until you get a new idea. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar. The goal is to just keep thinking and pouring your thoughts onto the paper. (Let them know they can use their imaginations. Create a sense of excitement/urgency.)
• Read the prompt and start the timer. Here are some sample prompts: 
  • What do you think it would be like to live [Insert Era]? 
  • "Do you think you would have liked to ... [worked as a cowboy/girl on the open range? come to Montana to prospect gold?]
• Have students write for the full five minutes, and then draw a line where they stop writing.
• Study the topic.
• Return the initial "Write Your Way Ins" to your students.
• Under the line they drew on their initial quick rights, have them repeat the process with a new prompt asking, "now what do you know/think?"

Why Write Your Way In/Out?

• It activates background knowledge (important for reading comprehension).
• It provides a reason for reading (also important for reading comprehension).
• It gives you a quick sense of what your students do and don’t know about a topic. 
• It helps students cement what they learned by reflecting on it in writing (in a very low stakes way) at the end of the unit. 
• It provides students an opportunity to use new vocabulary in their "Write You Way Outs." (Again, low stakes practice is good!) 
• It gets students writing. (I've had one teacher tell me she got a page out of a student who had never written more than a sentence previously.)

I'll be featuring some of the other literacy strategies we've integrated into Montana: A History of Our Home and other lesson plans in future posts. If you have a favorite you use, drop me a line.